A rainy day in a great city should be no less great. The trick is picking a neighborhood with enough indoor density — bookshops, cafés, museums, covered markets, hotel bars — that the weather becomes a backdrop rather than a problem.
Our favorites worldwide:
Paris's 6th arrondissement. Bookshops, covered passages, Saint-Germain hotel bars. Rainy Paris at its most romantic.
London's Bloomsbury. The British Museum, Persephone Books, Waterstones Gower Street, and endless cafés. A full rainy day is a feature, not a bug.
Tokyo's Jimbocho. The world's densest concentration of second-hand bookshops, many with cafés attached.
Porto's Ribeira. The port tasting rooms alone justify a rainy afternoon.
Copenhagen's Vesterbro. Kødbyen's covered courtyards, Vesterbro's cafés, the Meatpacking District's bars.
Vienna's Innere Stadt. Coffeehouses that have been designed to absorb rainy afternoons for 200 years.
Seoul's Insa-dong. Tea houses, galleries and covered arcades designed for exactly this weather.
Rain is not a trip-ruiner. A bad neighborhood is. Book the right one and you will remember the rain fondly.
